Digital marketing strategies continue to evolve, and there’s always some friction between the new forms of marketing and the ‘tried & true’ traditional methods of marketing. Most marketers believe blending traditional and digital marketing methods is the key to creating one effective strategy that amplifies your online presence and yields better results.
Additionally, the long-term success of your business requires you to innovate, take risks, and transform. This is the principle that drives businesses to embrace the latest high-tech services and products to make sure they don’t fall behind in the ever-growing digital economy.
The biggest challenge to this approach is that the integration of new digital marketing strategies comes at the expense of discarding various traditional marketing methods. This is a potentially costly mistake. After all, the traditional marketing approach is still a valuable asset for B2B organizations. As new technologies emerge, blending traditional and digital marketing is worth trying.
To realize the full potential of marketing tools, move leads down your funnel, and ultimately convert them to buyers, marketers must employ an omnichannel and holistic approach that retails the roles for traditional marketing tools.
Blending traditional and digital marketing methods
Sure, the digital revolution has significantly improved marketers’ ability to reach wider audiences, engage them, and convert them into buyers. However, traditional marketing tools like networking, direct mail, and cold calling are still essential for building a highly memorable and profitable brand.
Therefore, creating an effective marketing strategy requires you to reap the best of these worlds by seamlessly blending traditional and digital marketing. But how? Here are five ways to integrate digital marketing channels and traditional assets.
1. Cold calling & intent data
There’s a heated debate around cold calling whether or not it’s an effective marketing tactic. Should marketers leave it in the late 1970s or defiantly claim that it is not dead? When you add intent data into the mix, the cold calls of the 1970s could become the warm and effective calls of tomorrow.
By carefully integrating intent data into the entire cold calling process, digital marketers can reach more qualified leads (a potential customer) while foregoing contacting the least promising leads. Intent data signals which prospects are more likely to convert, making cold calling a far more efficient advertising method. Before you start making calls, use the intent data to identify the following;
- The prospects looking for the solutions you provide
- The other solutions they might be considering
- The context clues they may be telling about their ability or readiness to purchase
- How to assess and address their unique needs
These powerful insights make it easy for the sales teams to improve conversion rates. After all, all marketers strive to gather as many details about their prospects as possible. To optimize conversion rates and lower stress associated with calling unqualified leads, intent data is the missing piece and can be found by blending traditional and digital marketing methods.
2. Print media & deep media nurturing
Experienced marketers know the actual value of developing and nurturing buyer relations at each stage of their sales funnels. Indeed, they must establish a buyer-focused mindset that’s wired to drive sales at a low cost and successfully adapt according to the changing buyer journey. With the emergence of deep media nurturing – a highly integrated omnichannel approach that utilizes a broad range of digital tools – digital marketers have already taken the lead when it comes to nurturing beyond the inbox.
That means savvy marketers are going a step deeper by expanding their nurturing approach beyond the digital space. For example, running ads on digital magazines using premium programmatic displays is one of the common deep media nurturing methods.
Although print media isn’t as popular as it once was, there is a reason print editions of various digital magazines are still in circulation – target audiences still read them. Remember, the ultimate objective of deep media nurturing is to effectively reach prospects across different channels to improve the probability of conversion. Therefore, it makes sense to incorporate print media advertising into your mix and accelerate your conversion rates.
The promise of deep media nurturing depends on crafting custom messaging attuned to each buyer’s journey. Print media allows digital marketers to get more granular and target their ideal audiences in the industry publications with customized and relevant messages or print ads.
3. Traditional content platforms & geotargeting
Banners, billboards, and other traditional content platforms are now making a resurgence in the B2B marketing methods. They help marketers drive brand awareness, engage new audiences, and reinforce brand messaging. Integrating geotargeting – a tactic that determines the geolocation of a site visitor and provides tailored content based on the user’s location – can optimize the overall impact of various traditional content platforms.
Geotargeting allows marketers to pinpoint a prospect’s location, giving them a deeper understanding of the buyer’s persona and their journey map. This helps the marketer to advertise content on platforms where the target audience is most likely to see and remember it. Placing the right advertising messages on the right platforms creates brand equity in various areas that matter, something that can be achieved by seamlessly blending traditional and digital marketing methods.
4. Direct mail & lead nurturing.
Although lead nurturing is essential to conversion rate optimization, the volume of digital or online exchanges improves the odds that digital communications end up being perceived as digital spam. One prudent technique to hedge against your digital messages from being drowned out by the sheer volume of online content is to carefully augment lead nurturing with direct mails.
This may sound like a blast from the past. However, the current rate of inbox message saturation in direct mail is a strategy that works. Note that the underlying idea is to send your prospects something of value and relevance that will help your brand stand out.
Suppose five follow-up emails don’t elicit a response from your prospect, what are the odds a sixth email will drive a conversion? However, a follow-up in the form of a custom postcard, physical letter, or a thoughtful gift could be a significant differentiator that triggers the prospect to consider agreeing to an appointment.
Direct mails offer endless personalization opportunities, and this can go a long way towards building trust by addressing your prospect’s needs directly. In fact, it makes them more likely to respond and increases their likelihood of moving down the sales funnel.
5. Events & Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
Today, all savvy B2B marketers depend on ABM to target and engage various accounts that are more likely to convert. What they don’t know is that leveraging the targeting power of account-based marketing can help realize the full potential of both events and ABM.
A well-thought-out ABM tech stack will help marketers hone in on their lucrative accounts and get a prioritized view of the top decision-makers (as well as influencers) at a specific account. As you narrow in on the right-fit accounts, they must monitor the online activities of their marketing targets and identify the specific signals that can trigger an event outreach.
Indeed, ABM tech grants marketers access to critical real-time insights based on their account’s online activity and lets them act on these signals. Also, ABM allows marketers to deprioritize various low-yielding industry events (or a poorly performing advertising campaign).
Final thought
In the age of unprecedented tech innovations, some marketers may be tempted to ditch the traditional advertising methods. However, these marketing methods can potentially bolster your marketing initiatives. Most of the leading companies are blending traditional and digital marketing tactics, implementing a holistic mix of the traditional and digital tactics to create rich engagements that drive conversion rates. Please consult with our content marketers to learn more about blending traditional and digital marketing forms of advertising.
